Cheats and Secrets
This page contains info on Cheats and Secrets, as well as glitches and exploits found in Darkest Dungeon.
Access Backer Heroes from the Stage Coach
Darkest Dungeon is all about the randomness - you never know who is going to step off the Stage Coach and enter your party next... or do you?
During the intial kickstarter campaign for the game, the stuido set a backer reward that would let backers create their own hero, with a custom name, outfit, skills, and 2 locked in positive quirk and 1 locked in negative quirk. As of the game's release, there are 300 such heroes just waiting to be summoned.
To unlock these heroes into your party, visit the Stage Coach. Ignore any of the random classes that await you, and instead press the enter button to bring up a kickstarter search. By entering a correct hero name, it will pull up a corresponding class to recruit for you to use. However, if the hero is dismissed or dies, they cannot be re-recruited through more searching.
The hardest part of this trick is of course, knowing the names to summon. As it happens, there is a file in your Darkest Dungeon game folder called Backer_Heroes.json (The directory should be Steam/SteamApps/common/DarkestDungeon/shared/hero)
An excerpt of the .json file (the highlighted part indicates one hero)
The file itself can't be read normally, so open it with a notepad or text file to be greeted by a large jumble of symbols and nonsense. Scroll through the random strings of text until you start seeing fragments like "hero_class" "hero_name" and "backer_name". Each individual hero will start with the string (hero name) hero_name followed by their class and the name of the actual backer. The name you want to enter into the stage coach search is the one that appears before hero_name.
Of course, knowing which hero or even class for that matter is another hurdle - but there is a way to narrow the search. In between the strings hero_class and backer_name are a few random letters and symbols that actually denote the hero's class - unfortunately they aren't in english. However you can use this handy guide to search for the type of class you are looking to bring on (It's reccomended you copy and paste the below symbol and ctrl-f the notepad to find the string):
Class | Character String |
Abomination | ævba |
Arbalest | ô_ba |
Bounty Hunter | |Oba |
Crusader | gFba |
Grave Robber | ôba |
Hellion | ž»ba |
Highwayman | Û|ba |
Hound Master | <ôba |
Jester | ½‚ba |
Leper | µ3ba |
Man-at-Arms | |^ |
Occultist | êÕba |
Plague Doctor | Ýba |
Vestal | Ûba |
- Note that the Grave Robber and Hound Master has similar characters, if the string does not contain a < then it is a Grave Robber.
Infinite Gold Glitch
As of Build 13344, this exploit has been patched and is no longer possible
Darkest Dungeon has just been released and many new players are finding it very difficult to build up an awesome party, mainly due to the fact that money is just so difficult to get. However, this page will guide you on how to make free money that requires almost no effort at all.
With the new update for the final release of the game, Red Hook Studios added in an interesting mechanic to characters in that most of them now give your party a free item depending on their class. You can find out what characters give which item on their respective pages, located here.
But you cannot sell these items that you get from the classes in the game. Attempting to do so will give you the above notification stating that the item cannot be sold. We here at IGN have discovered an exploit on how to bypass this and all it requires is multiples of the same character that give you an item when you are in the provision menu as of build 13322.
First, put two to four characters into your party that give the same item in the provision menu. You can do this either by revisiting the Stage Coach to recruit multiples of a particular class, or you can access Backer Heroes using another secret method below. Here, In the image above, notice the two Jesters and the Leper, all of which give one Medicinal Herb each. Now, go into the Provision menu (select any random quest, we won't be going into it anyways), and you'll find that you'll have multiple herbs in your provision inventory.
Now, normally, if you tried to sell a single item obtained from a class, it would tell you that you cannot do that. However, when you have multiples of the same item, it allows you to sell as many as you want until you have only 1 left, and then the game stops you from selling that single item. Using this method, you can sell the items, head back out into the quest menu and keep the money you made, go back into the provisions menu with your added gold in hand, and repeat.
You can technically earn infinite money this way, but it would take quite a while! Still, if you need a small amount of money to do anything, this is definitely the way to do so. For best results, you should use four Grave Robbers to sell three Shovels at a time, making 750 gold per sell. If you don't have some Grave Robbers lying around, you can search the Stage Coach for the following names:
Keewatin, Longshot, Sypher, Seclea